


Smoke 'em if you got 'em

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood RPF
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-03
Updated: 2011-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-18 22:49:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometime in all of it, Gareth's hand hits his and leaves Eve's hair, and he's pressing, squeezing a little, and John leans back and presses the back of his skull into the wall behind him.  Maybe this stuff is kicking in, maybe it's been kicking in for a while, maybe they can blame it on alien sex pollen in the weed, Naughty Newport Nympho blend or something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smoke 'em if you got 'em

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the March RPF Carnivale.

He doesn't really care if she finds him. It's the end of shooting, and he's been hiding in his trailer, rolling the joint back and forth in his fingers and wondering what would happen if he were to just smoke it right here. Just, light up. Burn one. Scott used to call it getting pistol-whipped. What are they going to do to him, anyway? The first time Russ had called him and told him the good news about Torchwood being picked up to film a first season, he'd been higher than a…person who was very high. Half the people on this set like to go home at the end of a full week of filming and smoke up.

He hadn't had to ask very far, and he had a short list of people he felt okay asking, because one wrong thing and all the sudden the Daily Mail is screaming, 'John Barrowman: secret ganja king?'

So he went to the best and most discreet source he could think of.

"Gaz was looking for you," Eve says through the door. He doesn't answer, lets the dim light in the trailer try to communicate that he's not there, that he's somewhere else, when he's really sitting in the dark next to his shit in boxes, ready to be moved home or away because it's the end of the season, and they're not sure there'll be another one. Hell, it's just the two of them now, sort of, and what kind of show could they build out of…oh, he thinks, David carried Who himself. Sure, he always has Billie or Freema or Cath, but it's a two-person team, and he and Eve could--

"I know you're in there, because it's too quiet everywhere else," she says, and he smiles as he runs the very thick joint under his nose like a Montecristo. It's rolled expertly, he'd asked Gaz to do it and had sat here while the man had set the amount and rolled the paper, mumbling that no one used joints anymore and that he'd loan John a bowl if he wanted it. Then John had smiled as the very tip of Gaz's tongue had slid across the paper and he'd caught John's eyes and snorted, mumbled something about perverts and sex and innocent joint rolling.

Then he'd let John offer to blow him before stumbling out into the harsh light of well, the harsh light of not-trailer time.

So here he is, looking at the perfect roach, and the tight paper, smelling this thing that's thick enough to be a cigarette and guaranteed to set his voice back a few days and also possibly interact with the three glasses of vodka he's had, mostly because he doesn't know what do to with himself. Wardrobe had come for the coat, but he'd not had extra clothes to change into since the ones he'd worn to set this morning were covered in salsa (long story). He's wearing Jack's trousers and shirt, having surrendered the cufflinks, but the braces are dark blue and he's taken off the boots, so he feels like Jack unpeeled, maybe. Jack—the squishy fleshy bits.

Jack would totally smoke this fucker.

Eve opens the trailer door and peeks in, her eyes wide and her mouth a little smiley, always smiles for him, she has. She doesn't usually act like his PA, but ever since they had found out about well, the thing, Eve's moved to be his second, like she's phantom playacting Gwen to his Jack.

"You're conspicuous by your absence," she says, squeezing through the door as tightly as she can.

"It's true," he mumbles, "It's not a party until I'm there."

Eve blinks in the dimness and leans on one of the cleared counters. "Are you sulking?"

"I don't sulk," John says, rolling the joint in between two fingers and examining it from afar. "I brood."

Eve snorts, and they freeze as two people walk by the outside of the trailer, chatting about something, gaffing, lighting, something. John doesn't think anyone would ever care about one joint, and he's _John fucking Barrowman_ which isn't like being Barry Manilow or Barack Obama or anything, but it's got a lot of weight on the BBC set of Torchwood.

Eve sits down next to him on the sofa and sighs, a big exhale. "Gaz said this is for you," she whispers, opening her palm and showing him the plastic disposable lighter with an Ed Hardy tiger on it. "Said he bought it special this morning."

John plucks the lighter out of her palm and wags it back and forth at her. "Rowr," he whispers. "Thanks."

Eve looks at the joint. "Are you going to light that?"

He shrugs. "Maybe," he returns, voice still library-quiet, like all the times they conspire while the set is live and they have to be _vewwy vewwy qwiet_ so that Burn can emote or something.

Eve grabs his wrist up and bends his arm at the elbow so she can smell the joint. "He didn't give you that Newport bottom barrel shite, right?" she murmurs. "That'll ruin you."

John shrugs. "I don't remember what I paid, but it was folding money, not coins."

Eve snickers. "Why are we whispering?"

John kicks the little table in front of them when he stretches out, and Eve puts her legs on top of his, leaning into him, so that they are tangled up on the sofa, sitting in the dark, whispering conspiratorially, like they're plotting to overthrow the government. Or maybe just break a few laws.

John will admit that he doesn't know shite about pot. Yeah, he's been there, but he's rarely had to ever buy it for himself. It's always _someone else's_ pot, he has a voice to preserve, blah blah. He's done the pills and once for a wild youth weekend, a little bit of coke, but instead of getting high and fun and shit it just made him High! On! Coke! And he already jumps about enough. Once Claire had convinced him to snort a Pixie stick up his nose, and that had produced similar effects, so he's fairly sure coke is a lie anyway.

"Okay so here's the thing," Eve says. "I know you're going to get caned and I want in." She looks at him, blinks. "So come on."

He laughs. "I don't get caned. Gaz gets caned. I'm going to—"

"Enjoy a smokeable herbal refreshment," she finishes for him, grinning. "Not in here you aren't." She glances up at the smoke alarm. "We could disable it."

Hrm. John stares at the door to the trailer when someone runs by it, footsteps thudding on the pavement. Even if they locked it, someone--

"What about Operation: Baby Bump?" he asks, because he doesn't want his first act for Eve's kid to be bombarding its splitting cells with THC. Uncle John: Best. Influence. Ever.

Eve sighs. "No movement since the test I took this morning." She folds her arms. "You only blow up a secret military base for the telly once in your life, and I think we deserve to celebrate the explosion."

John eyes her face, pale, freshly washed, all the makeup gone, just her left and her crap taste in ASDA George-brand clothes, and her crossed arms and her little sock feet rubbing on his shins and he realises that they are going to get…whatever the word is for it.

"Okay I have a plan." He stands and waves a hand. "Come."

Eve gets off the sofa with effort and a grunt and slaps his hands when he offers to help. "Is this like your clever plan at the Pret with the plastic bags and the piss?"

John turns away from her. "That would have worked. It would have been gross, but it would have worked." Eve's response is to snap his braces from the back, but he ignores her and opens the accordion folding door to the loo.

The trailer is actually more like a travel trailer because they've had to move them. Auntie Beeb hadn't given them their nice trailers back, not for this, they had said, five eps was nothing like a full season, and they could make do with the portable trailers, and so for the most part it was like living in a luxury camper. But even luxury campers too often had the dreaded tiny loo small as an airplane toilet but with a shower.

"Oh, you sick bastard," Eve says, but he turns and backs into the stall, sitting on the toilet lid.

"Come on, then, no smoke alarms," and when she parts his knees so that she can stand in between his legs it occurs to her then that she has to shut the door. John enjoys the view (look, sometimes an ass is an ass. He doesn't want to fuck it. He just wants to spank it a little) and he grabs her waist and yanks so that she settles in his lap with a squeak. The magnets on the door latch shut and they sit there in the dark, before he turns the shower light on and then it's all dimness and poor sick yellow fluorescence. She scooches a bit in his lap so that she's sitting him sidesaddle and they can see each other's faces, she's really rather light, and her back is to the sink on his right.

He lights the joint and they giggle, heads together, the tiny space reminding him of the time that his da had rented a Winnibago for them to holiday across America in one summer when he'd been young, and Carole had got some sort of horrible stomach virus and holed up in the bathroom, and the smell had—

Well, bad vacation. Carole swears that she will never travel in another Winnibago, but she likes the tour buses.

Eve takes a big hit from the joint and holds it in, eyes getting wider and wider, and he stares at her breasts.

"The loo in mine," she says in a high-pitched voice as she holds her breath, "is twice as big."

John takes the joint from her and hits off it. Normally, he'd be all macho about it, but it's Eve, and when he's with her, or Coco, his whole 'one of the girls' gay man self-preservation technique kicks in for whatever reason, and so he coughs pretty hard and hotboxes the joint and when she takes it from him he coughs into her shoulder and when she reaches around to pound his back the impact of her fist on his spine pushes his face into her chest and he can even feel the hardness of her nipple on his cheek, though her thin bra and even thinner shirt. He waves his hands, one finally settling on her waist, and with the other he takes the joint again for a second try.

"How long does this take to work?"

Eve frowns. "I dunno. I'm warning you, I get Welsh when I'm high."

He laughs. "Oh my god that is the best thing ever."

They take a few more hits and laugh, more from the situation itself, and John starts to wonder when he'll feel it kick in. Eve is humming and the clock is so slow, well, he thinks it would be, should be, if he looked at his watch. It slides about on his wrist, under the floppy open Jack shirt cuffs, and he thinks this would make a great picture: Gwen and Jack get ripped in a portatoilet.

He would hum the theme song, but he can't even _remember_ that shit.

The outer door to the trailer opens and they freeze again, but this time because they are busted. Eve hands him the joint and it occurs to him that she might try to pin it on him. "Don't say anything," she whispers.

He covers his mouth with his free hand and has to take it off because it's really hot. "I didn't exhale?" he whispers and she nods, snickering.

"This place reeks of illegal recreational drugs," Gareth says, opening the sliding accordion door of the loo and looking at them, John sitting on the toilet, Eve in his lap, both their faces surely surprised, the joint burning in John's fingers. The smoke wafts out into the trailer proper.

"Gaz!" John says loudly and when Eve pulls a face he remembers that for some unintelligible reason they are supposed to be _vewwy vewwy qwiet_ and he bites his lips, but it's hard to do that because his face isn't cooperating. "I think your drugs are broken," he tells him. "I don't feel anything."

Eve nods. "You should get your money back."

John blinks at the taps on the sink. "I just can't stop smiling and I don't know why." He tilts his head and looks at Gareth. "My face hurts."

Gareth pulls one of his sober Ianto faces. "This is very sad," he says matter-of-fact.

Eve grabs his arm and tries to pull, but Gareth has…many stones on her and she, like, whoa. "Get in. The alarm is going to go off and you…"

Gareth laughs then, and it takes John what feels like five minutes to realise that he is in fact, caned. Not Gareth. John. Wasted. Gone. Blown. Wow.

Gareth looks about at the loo, small as it is, but finally manages to squeeze in by opening the shower and sliding in there sideways, while Eve pulls the door shut with her hands and in so doing wiggles in John's lap a bit. Nice. It's like she does exercise tapes. What's that thing? Buns of Steel? Like that.

Scott has buns of steel.

He could go for some buns now. Or a croissant.

Oh god. A croissanwich. He would eat the fuck out of one of those.

Or like. Four. Or like.

Gareth sits on the floor of the shower, back against the wall, knees drawn up, and he lifts a bag in his hand, a small brown paper thing that holds a few bottles of beer. That's great, because John can feel his tongue drying up. Eve is giggling and handing the pilfered joint to Gareth and Gareth is the only one who could take the bottle tops off anyway, and it's beer and it's _good_ beer, and John doesn't like beer but this is possibly the best beer in the universe. Eve says something to Gareth and John leans back against the wall behind the toilet and stares at the plastic in-between the panels of the folding door.

Eve and Gareth kill it, cash it, whatever the slang is, and Gareth grinds the roach out on the bottom of his trainer and pockets it, something about long stems and recycling.

Gareth looks up at the two of them and smiles, but it's wistful, sad, not like happy giggly Eve or even John, who can feel the muscles in his face relaxing even though he knows that he's still smiling.

"I like it in here," Gaz says then. "This is cool."

Eve stretches her arms above her head, and it makes her arse press into John's lap and his 'hello! Grinding on my dick!' automatic response kicks in. It could be Phyllis Diller sitting in his lap, a sentient eggplant in his lap, and he'd be hard. Grinding in the lap. Hmm.

Ground meat. Tacos. He could eat the hell out of a taco, too.

"I'll miss you guys," Eve says. "I mean, yeah, it's…" She lowers her hands and tilts her head as if she's trying to think about it, but John loses her and then she loses herself, and Gareth isn't even listening.

"This is…this is our Hub, man," he says, waving a hand and it hits the wall before he brings it around to find John's sockfoot and squeeze the ankle before his fingers go in search of Eve's calves.

Eve laughs and John presses his forehead into her shoulder, and because her shirt is silky he bites her bra strap through the cloth, pulling at away and letting it snap back into place. Gareth watches silently.

"The acoustics are good in here," John answers. "We could record a radio play in here. Torchwood: The Loo Files."

Eve leans forward into the shower stall and kisses Gareth's head on top, all that short hair that he'll probably grow out the first chance he gets, when all this filming is over, because he hates it short. Something about rock being hard core. And long hair.

And wait, who has long hair?

"Torchwood: High on Life," Gareth grunts, and turns his head suddenly so that he can brush faces with Eve, and John has to admit that he likes to watch and he'd have liked to see them make out on the set, for a script, that would have been hot. Or like, a big ass orgy and he and Coco could have made jokes with Binny about the giant Torchwood strap-on festival. Maybe they did that. It's easy to forget how many sex jokes they make, easy to lose track, easy to…

Croissanwich. Yeah. Or oh shit, he used to have a tin of shortbread around here.

He's about to stand up and dump Eve all the way into the shower stall when he realises that he's about to stand up and dump Eve in the shower. Not cool. Besides, right now Gareth's free hand is in her hair and he's trying to kneel and kiss her at the same time, and everyone is moving so very slowly. It occurs to John that straight people are kissing and usually he's not into that, but Gareth is sort of gay for him (on the telly) and John's sort of straight for Eve (on the telly) and maybe they can all be sexy for each other (high on pot in the loo), and if that isn't what their perverted little funky family is about then he doesn't know (Colonel Mustard in the TARDIS with a screwdriver).

Gareth threads his hand in her hair and John runs his over it, and Eve wiggles in his lap, and there is no way that's not deliberate. An empty bottle clunks in the shower stall when Gareth jostles and his head does that ducking down and up thing that he does when he kisses; Gareth kisses in oval shaped whip-snaps of the head, pressing in with tongue and teeth, and John had thought that was just for him or for the screen, but Eve has her fists balled in the ribbed edge of his collar and she's breathing through her nose and John can hear it from here, and everything is drawn out slow, like they've been trapped in a time lock or something.

Sometime in all of it, Gareth's hand hits his and leaves Eve's hair, and he's pressing, squeezing a little, and John leans back and presses the back of his skull into the wall behind him. Maybe this stuff is kicking in, maybe it's been kicking in for a while, maybe they can blame it on alien sex pollen in the weed, Naughty Newport Nympho blend or something.

They should sell this shit on his website.

With pancake mix. Barrowman Pancake Mix and Syrup. He could eat the fuck out of some pancakes.

He can feel them moving and Eve's weight shifts; he can hear them mumbling, but they sound very far away and when he opens his eyes again, her back is pressed to the sink and her arms are about Gareth's shoulders and neck, Gareth's who has pushed in between her legs, sprawling out of the shower stall into the space, his waist pressing into John's thigh, his hand still tangled in John's fingers. John wants to lean forward, to upset their precarious balance on and against his lap, to worm his way in, but it's not his party. It's not even their party, really, but it's something.

Gareth pulls back and nips at her jaw-line a little and they rub noses, his mum used to call those Eskimo kisses, but that's not the right word for it anymore. Before he can devote his three working brain cells to the fact that he could eat the fuck out of an Eskimo pie, Gaz's hand pulls out of his own and snags one of the braces, tugging it and him forward so that he can capture John's mouth in his, and that kiss is nothing, _nothing_ like the stage kiss, the camera kiss.

For one, it's almost not there; it's shy, tentative, unsure. It's a man who isn't sure about kissing a man. It's straight kissing trying to be gay and only when John falls into it, imitating Gareth's whippy head snap, it mutates into something more familiar. It's a man and not a character. It's an actor and not a secretary. It's initial G, not I.

Eve's arms slide under his chin as she disengages as much as she can, but her fingers find his hair, find Gareth's skin as she slides up the back of his shirt and John can finally make his hands move and when Gareth breaks the kiss and bites his lower lip, his bottom teeth scraping the stubble just below the lip, stubble that he always has at the end of the day when he has to shave at four in the morning for a full day of shooting and blowing up things.

"This is fucked up," Gareth says, and he doesn't add the, 'but it's cool,' because if he wasn't cool with it he'd be gone. Eve purrs when Gareth's far hand finds its way up her shirt, and John wonders if he could get away with it too. He likes to touch them sometimes, wonders what it would be like to have more than falsies sewn into his dresses when he does drag (oh man, he's going to have tonnes of those for La Cage, he just knows it. They better give him a _spectacular_ rack.). But he doesn't, because he's still got a forehead pressed to Gareth's, and he's wondering if it counts as a mile high club entry if you're on the ground in a simulated airplane loo.

"I don't see you leaving," Eve says, and when they turn their heads to look at her, her mouth is for John and she's all soft and stubbleless and a smaller opening in general and she's brutal, really, tippy tongue and pointy teeth like a little carnivore. Gareth chuckles at his shock and hesitancy, and maybe he's just amused.

John wonders when this became all about making out in his trailer, and less about the fantastic high he has right now, because his skin feels covered in tiny little hairs and his head tingles the way it does when he sits in front of the sofa at home and Scott combs it with his fingers when they watch the telly. Gareth's aftershave/cologne is something fake manly—Axe or something—and Eve's clothes smell like fabric softener and he is probably making that up because who could smell anything in the smoke in here?

Eve has made it no secret that she's always thought Jack and Gwen should have a snog, release the tension, but they never have, and so they've never practised it, and John wonders if this is supposed to make up for that. He doesn't mind, though the very far away part of him wishes they were filming Jack, Ianto and Gwen making out in the loo. For the DVDs, an Easter egg you only find when you press an impossible combination of buttons on the remote. The cheat code would be in the net in twenty-four hours after the release.

Gareth bends to breathe heavily on her chest, biting her nipples through her shirt, and John has to still him, and when Eve pulls back, she blinks one, twice, and then she sighs.

"Wrap party," she reminds them. Of course there's a wrap party. They're having one on the set tonight, a Gatorade tossing event for the actual location, and then in a few days they will trash John's house. He has a cleaning service on standby. Possibly a haz-mat team.

But her 'wrap party' really means something else, and that's good enough. Gareth twists one hand around John's braces, buries his face in her shoulder and squeezes her waist on the other side, and Eve's arms go about them both. John presses his face to her hair, breathes into the softness of her bowed head as she whispers something to Gareth's slowly shaking shoulders and he knows that it's not just the weed.

He wants to tell them both that it's over but it's still great. He wants to tell them that they'll still be friends, but it doesn't work like that, not in this business, because he might get their texts and see them for lunch, but they'll never be forced to sit in the daily room at two am looking at shots, or wile away three hours playing "never have I ever" with the guest stars of the week in Eve's trailer while they wait for the lighting to be rewired, or any of the dozen other ways that long days of shooting and unexpected periods of downtime in a show provides them, and that's a funeral in itself, sort of. It's why he's smoking up, actually, and why he can feel Gareth's shoulders shuddering, because he's moving on, moving on without them. It will be great, it will, but not the same, and that's always sad. It's how John feels every time his show runs are over.

Pot is making him a little too introspective to his taste. He swills the beer, because the cottonmouth is pretty bad. Oh man, watermelon. That would be so _fucking good_ , right about now.

"I want a pizza," Eve says into the silence.

"Yeah," John says. "I could eat the fuck—"

"Get your own pizza."

Gareth's shaking turns into something else. "You two are fucking lightweights." He pulls the brace away from John's chest and John readies himself a split second before the released thing slaps him hard in the chest. "I'll buy you both your own pizza."

Eve doesn't let go of them, just rubs her cheek on the top of Gareth's head so that the other one slides against John's cheek, and there they are, triptych. Her hand pets his shirt, fingers tracing the V of the braces in the back, one shape over and over, but whose meaning is clear: _just another minute, just another minute._

He has many many minutes left.

END


End file.
